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A Primer On Country Dating

If you’re English and you live in the countryside, please follow The Telegraph‘s enlightening primer on rural dating, which offers up some hassle-free advice for all y’all with slim pickings out in the sticks.

Well, because farmers and other rural people work long hours and live in small communities, it’s good to date outside the box and try using the invention we city-folk call ‘The Internet.’ The Internet is great for trolling, spamming, and generally hiding your identity while doing sordid things, but it’s also ideal for dating!

Just ask sisters Lucy and Emma Reeves, who founded the rural dating website Muddy Mates, or something like that, after they perceived a gaping, roiling crater in the country dating market:

Muddy Matches is an online community designed to bring together rural lonely hearts. “The downside of hunt balls and race meets is they can be cliquey,” Lucy says. “We organise rural singles’ events such as regional pub grub nights, sailing trips and an annual ball.”

Perfect. Lucy Reeves knows that combating the cliquey-ness of hunt balls—not to be confused with the infamous country ball hunts, which formed the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s romantic comedy, Eyes Wide Shut—is simply a matter of branding: if you call the get-together an “annual ball” instead of a “hunt ball,” people will forget that they’re supposed to be cliquey, and all the over-the-hump people will start grinding mindlessly to Stravinsky’s Circus Polka. Problem solved.

Lucy and Emma Reeves, voodoo matchmakers.

The Telegraph soars into Press Awards territory when it doubles down, takes a big slug of awesome, and asks the questions we were all thinking but were too cowardly to ask:

But what’s the point of falling in love with someone who lives miles away from your house?

My point exactly: nobody wants to drive 20 kilometers through the green countryside to maintain a relationship. People would much rather squeeze themselves into expensive subterranean capsules of sweat, and rub shoulders with masses of friendly, selfless people—just like they do in the city, where everyone smiles! Because everyone knows that being in love makes all the little things like swallowing your pride, or driving your car, serially tougher. Being in love is a handicap couched in a burden.

The Telegraph finishes off with some practical advice for its readers:

A hat can make country clothes look more glamorous and do wonders for windblown hair.

Country people, especially farmers, toil on the land all day. And so they are too tired when they get off work to change into decent clothes—you know, the ones without the poop on them. Plus, if you live in the country, you can’t look glamorous anyway, because you don’t live in the city. So just fiddle with that hat, let it cover your windblown hair, and go get ‘em, my golly!